Kurds Object to Iraqi Army in Diyala;
Ninevah Seeks to Postpone Elections
The Ninevah Provincial Council has voted to delay provincial elections, scheduled for January 31. The council does not actually have the authority to delay the elections, which have been set by the federal parliament. The move suggests severe Kurdish-Arab tensions in the province. Since Sunni Arabs, the majority in Ninevah and Mosul, boycotted the 2005 provincial elections, Ninevah's governing council is disproportionately Kurdish. It is likely that many of these representatives will be swept from power on Jan. 31, and that Sunni Arabs will take over, including the governorship. That development would heavily interfere with Kurdistan nationalists' hopes to incorporate at least part of Ninevah into the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Anxiety that the state security forces might intervene in the provincial elections is widespread. Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq called on Iraqi security forces not to interfere with the voting. There have been rumors that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki may attempt to use the levers of state to promote his Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa). Al-Maliki is allied with ISCI in parliament and on the cabinet, but in the elections, Da'wa and ISCI are rivals.
Likewise, Al-Hayat writing in Arabic suggests that the arrest of 38 officials from the Interior and Defense ministries was tied to the electoral ambitions of Interior Minister Jawad Bulani, who founded his own party and made his brother the secretary-general. Al-Maliki is said to have been disturbed at the idea of a cabinet minister engaging in electoral politics. Those arrested were accused of belonging to the al-Awdah or "Return" party, a reformulation of the banned Baath Party. These low-level officials, it was admitted on Thursday, could not actually have made a coup.
The USG Open Source Center translates an article on Kurdish concerns over the upcoming provincial elections in Diyala Province. Kurds in Diyala say that they are concerned that the Iraqi Army, which was sent into the province by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, might intimidate Kurdish voters. The Iraqi Army traded fire in late summer with elements of the Kurdistan paramilitary, the Peshmerga, which have deployed to cities such as Khanaqin even though they are not part of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Maliki is eager to regain such territory for the central government in Baghdad. Ironically, Kurds in Diyala see the Iraqi Army as Arab, while Arabs in Mosul see the Iraqi Army as Kurdish.
"Kurdish MP criticizes Iraqi army deployment in Diyala region
Kurdistani Nuwe
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Document Type: OSC Summary
Kurdish MP criticizes Iraqi army deployment in Diyala region
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) newspaper Kurdistani Nuwe reporter Baban Abd-al-Karim has said that the Kurdistan Alliance had announced its list of candidates for the Diyala Governorate Council in the forthcoming nationwide governorate elections due to be held on 31 January 2009.
In a report published on 14 December, Abd-al-Karim discussed the Kurdistan Alliance's campaign under the slogan of "Peace, fraternity and development", interviewed Arab and Turkoman supporters of the alliance as well Kurdish politicians who expressed concern about the impact of the presence of the Iraqi army in the area on voters.
The report quoted the head of the PUK Khanaqin branch as saying that preparation by PUK, Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and other political parties in the Kurdistan Alliance List had been under way for some time to ensure that the list would gain a large percentage of the votes in the forthcoming provincial elections. The PUK official added that the alliance list aimed to secure Arab and Turkoman as well as Kurdish votes.
The newspaper quoted the chief of Lahib tribe in the Diyala region, Shaykh Yusuf Ali, as saying: "As one of the chiefs of Arab tribes in the Diyala region, I and my tribe reaffirm our support for the Kurdistan Alliance List." He added: "We believe that Kurdistan Alliance List is the best and most solid list in the region and the success of the list will benefit us and other national groups."
Other residents of Diyala, such as the chief of Al-Hayali tribe, Shaykh Ahmad Muhammad Hamudi; Turkoman figure in Khanaqin, Ali Oghlu; and religious figure Shaykh Ahmad Sumaydi'i were also reported to have expressed their support for the Kurdistan Alliance List.
Member of the Iraqi parliament for Khanaqin Pishtiwan Ahmad expressed concern about the impact of the presence of the Iraqi army in the region on the electoral process and was quoted as saying: "Most certainly, the governorate council elections will not be free of problems, particularly in a problematic governorate such as Diyala where a large contingent of the Iraqi armed forces has been deployed in the area under the guise of pursuing terrorists. However, in reality the forces are indirectly affiliated to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's party and they have created a lot of problems for us."
Pishtiwan Ahmad is further quoted as saying that about 16,000 Kurds who lived in the Khanaqin area had not been listed in the electoral register for the forthcoming elections which would have direct bearing on the outcome of the elections. He urged the Higher Independent Electoral Commission to resolve that problem.
The head of the KDP branch in Khanaqin, Akbar Haydar, was quoted as having said that the continued presence of the Iraqi army in the region would have an adverse effect on the electoral process. He added that most of the voting centres had been put under the control of the armed forces and police forces composed of former Ba'thists, which could force citizens to refrain from exercising their democratic right.
(Description of Source: Al-Sulaymaniyah Kurdistani Nuwe in Kurdish -- daily newspaper published by Iraqi Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK))"
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/19/2008 12:04:00 AM
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Here is an example of the Free Elections, the Kurdish way as told by Maj. Anthony Cruz, Army reserve civil affairs officer assigned to work with the province electoral commission for the January 2005 general election:
Cruz, now back in Los Angeles, provided a detailed account of the election in Nineveh to IPS in interviews.
The 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division ("Stryker Brigade") was responsible for getting ballot boxes and ballots to polling places on the Nineveh plain in January's election. But it relied on battle-hardened Kurdish pershmurga militiamen to maintain security in the towns and villages, and did not know its way around the area well enough to deliver ballot boxes there with Kurdish help, according to Cruz.
So the Brigade agreed to send a U.S. convoy with the voting materials to meet a Kurdish delegation in the Kurdish town of Faida on the border of Kurdistan 50 miles north of Mosul, so that the convoy could be guided to the largely Christian and Shabak towns on the Plain of Nineveh.
When the convoy arrived in Faida the day before the election, however, the promised Kurdish guides never came. Instead, says Cruz, the Kurdish mayor of the town came demanding the ballots for what he called Kurdish towns on the list. The convoy commander wanted to take all the ballots back, because the mission had been aborted.
A tense standoff followed, and the convoy commander called Cruz for a decision on what to do with the ballots. He advised the commander to give the mayor enough ballots for four towns, and the convoy returned to Mosul.
On election day, Cruz recalls, the U.S. military tried to find helicopters to carry the ballot materials out to the six remaining district towns on the list, but was were able get ballots to only one town, Bashiqa, which is almost entirely Christian, Shabak and Yezidi, before the 5:00 p.m. close of voting.
But according to Cruz, Kurdish militiamen stole the ballots boxes from the polling place, returning them later after obviously tampering with them and offering bribes to the election workers to accept them.
Meanwhile a much more ambitious vote fraud scheme was unfolding in Sinjar, a relatively small district town in the west known to be a predominantly Sunni Arab area.
Around 12,000 ballots had been sent to Sinjar, but on election day KDP officials in Sinjar requested a number of ballots far in excess of the estimated electorate in the town and surrounding villages, according to Cruz. He recalls that the request was supported by the office of the interim president of Iraq, Sunni Arab Ghazi Al-Yawer.
Cruz remembers joking about the "500 percent voter participation rate" in Sinjar. Nevertheless, the Stryker Brigade Combat Team complied with the request for the ballots.
Later, the province Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI) forwarded 38 ballot boxes, 174 plastic sacks and 14 cardboard cartons of ballots that had obviously been tampered with to the national IECI. In some boxes, reams of ballot papers that had not even been folded were visible. In others, boxes had been resealed with red and green duct tape.
When Cruz asked the local IECI director how many of the fraudulent ballots had come from Sinjar, he was told, "All of them."
The average number of ballots per ballot box nationwide was 500, and if each of the 236 boxes and bags of votes from Sinjar had that many ballots, those bags would have contained about 115,000 ballots. The total number of legitimate votes in Nineveh was only 190,000.
The Kurds apparently wanted to bolster their claims on Sinjar and much of the Plain of Nineveh. They also were apparently trying to ensure that non-Kurdish minorities would not have enough votes to gain representation in the interim National Assembly or in the province council.
It did succeed in reducing the vote for the national Assyrian Christian list to exactly 3,346, despite an electorate approaching 100,000. The Iraqi Turkmen Front list garnered only 1,342 votes, despite an electorate that was many times larger.
Judging from the large disparity between the 77,000 legitimate votes for the Kurdish list for the national assembly and the 110,000 legitimate votes for the Kurdish list for province council, the Kurds deliberately shifted a substantial number of votes to Al-Yawer in return for his role in getting the additional ballots need for the vote-stuffing exercise. Al-Yawer was threatened with a minimal vote in the province because of the Sunni boycott.
Although it displayed the boxes and bags of fraudulent ballots, the national IECI downplayed the seriousness of the ballot-stuffing in Nineveh and covered up the Kurdish role in it.
In his press briefing on Feb. 8, IECI spokesman Farid Ayar blamed the ballot fraud on unidentified "militiamen or armed men". According to Maj. Cruz, however, the only such incident in the province was in Bashiqa.
Ayar refused to divulge which party would have profited from the fraudulent ballots, telling the journalists, "I can't accuse any party, because we don't know."
Re Kurdish council members seeking to block elections in Mosul:
The three Kurd provinces in the KRG are already exempted from Jan. 2009 elections, as is the battleground city of Kirkuk. Throw in an attempted stall in Mosul, and a pattern is starting to look pretty clear. Team Barzani wants to sit on their disproportionate 2005 representation, until the US withdrawal makes UN election monitoring even more dangerous.
It's getting harder to see the armed Kurd alliance as contenders in a new democratic order.
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